Dodo Pub Company

The ethos of the Dodo Pub Company from the start has been about serving the community in which they reside as the local, friendly neighbourhood pub where everyone is welcome. This was certainly true of the first pub they acquired or rescued – a “down and out boozer in the back street of East Oxford” which they transformed into The Rusty Bicycle in 2009. The chain has now grown into four successful pubs across Oxford and Cheltenham, all of them local go-to places within the heart of their communities.

The challenge: a one login software solution; open platform and fully flexible

By 2015 the Dodo company had expanded to multiple sites and needed an POS that could both support this growth and continue to adapt with the company. As Operations Manager, Fred Turner explains, “the POS systems that Dodo had used in the past were great for one, two, or even three sites but as you grow the accrual of data becomes more valuable and essential for us to make critical decisions thus requiring a multisite POS solution”.

Up to this point they had been working with multiple reporting, stock control and labour software and following their expansion, management needed a one software solution that combined all this functionality and more. It also needed to integrate with S4 labour software and have the capacity to integrate with any future software that they may decide to trial – essentially a POS system that could evolve as they evolved as a business. Fred re-joined the business in 2015 after spending a year working in hospitality in London where he encountered pointOne EPoS and thought it would be a great fit for Dodo.

Solution

pointOne installed our EPoS solution into The Rusty Bicycle in 2015 upon Fred’s recommendation and rolled our system out to all Dodo’s remaining sites thereafter. Answering Dodo’s requirement for a multisite POS, pointOne’s one login enables the management team to access site-level information across stock, sales, product and staffing, The Head Office module provides Dodo’s pub managers with granular reporting to help with their day-to-day operations and to assist them in meeting sales targets. Management use Head Office access for more refined and bespoke multisite reporting to help with forecasting, stock control and wastage management plus remote actions like menu and price changes.

pointOne also set up the integration with S4Labour ensuring that sales data automatically populates into S4Labour giving real time updates vs. labour spend and ensuring that Dodo is operating as cost effectively as possible.

The pointOne system allows us to be proactive rather than reactive which in the competitive hospitality industry is key. The POS is easy-to-use and engaging, providing us with a myriad of information to help run the Dodo pubs efficiently and cost-effectively."

Fred Turner, Operations Manager

Results

“The pointOne system allows us to be proactive rather than reactive which in the competitive hospitality industry is key. The POS is easy-to-use and engaging, providing us with a myriad of information to help run the Dodo pubs efficiently and cost-effectively. We are always striving for our pubs to offer the best quality food and drink in a welcoming environment for the surrounding community and having a POS system we trust to automate much of the operational data behind the scenes frees up our managers and staff to do what they do best which is offering a warm welcome to our customers”.

Dodo have recently added the Como loyalty integration we offer across all its pubs which enables staff to scan QR codes from the Dodo loyalty app on customers phones and offer rewards and incentives for returning customers. As Fred explains, “This data provides crucial information about our customers behaviour such as what they are buying, when they are coming in etc which helps us know what we are going to do 6 or 12 months down the line to keep relevant and fine-tuned to our customers’ needs”.

Dodo have ambitious plans to grow by two pubs a year over the next five years and the pointOne solution can fully support this growth with our flexible one sign-in EPoS hub.